This site was set up a few years ago with the intention to share updates about the art and work of John Beaudet. Little did we know that Frances would get not one but two successive jobs requiring most of her time and that John would undergo three major surgeries in as many years, leaving us little time to keep this artisan page up to date.

Now, he’s restored to health, our home is complete, and Bodacious spends most of his time doing trail maintenance, not only on the AT but also in the backyard he is so passionate about: The Rocky Fork Watershed.

This past year, that backyard has come under threat of over-development at the hands of the state of Tennessee, and John has been doing research, interviewing stakeholders, making phone calls, writing letters, sending emails, writing letters to the editor for various newspapers, and now he has a big announcement to make:

“I have figured out a way to collect all the information about Rocky Fork in one place and help keep everyone informed about this amazing resource that needs our protection. It’s here: rockyforkjournal.com

Yes, I, John Beaudet, who didn’t have electricity and was not even on the internet five years ago, have my own blog. While Frances helped me with the technical format, it is a project I am writing and will maintain myself, with as minimal help from her as I can get by with. Please visit rockyforkjournal.com and click the button on the right side of the page to “follow” the Rocky Fork Journal.

Also, if you are on Facebook, you can look up “Rocky Fork Watershed Almanac” and “like” or join it. This new site is named in honor of Aldo Leopold’s collection of essays proposing the idea of responsible relationship between people and the land they inhabit. It will be another way we can share information about the natural and cultural history of our very special backyard.”

Friday night, April 7, John was named Tennessee Eastman Hiking and Canoeing Club Maintainer of Year 2016. This was the introduction:

“His first participation as hiker with our club was Hard Core 2007 while we were digging 3,700 feet of new trail near Cherry Gap. By 2010 he was working with us regularly. The quality of his trail building, whether it is simple sidehill or rock steps, is second to none. By his example he has improved the quality of our trail building ever since.

“And he does not sacrifice quantity for quality. He goes at 100% for him, which is equivalent to about 180% for the rest of us. If there is a big rock to move, he is there. He visualizes the end result and strategizes a plan to accomplish it. At the end of a big day, he literally cannot walk back to the vehicles without resting several times along the way because he used all his energy at the work site.

He has made the AT a much better place as well as making us other maintainers better. But he really does not like to cut weeds!”

Back in early December, John drove to West Palm Beach, Florida, to work at the PGA’s Web.com Tour Qualifying School. As he did for 17 years, Bodhi (as he’s called there) was creating the hand-drawn scoreboard for this tournament. This photo shows the Canadian champion with scoreboard in the background.

Another of John’s big commitments is to his Appalachian Trail maintenance work. As a member of the all-volunteer Tennessee Eastman Hiking and Canoeing Club, Bo spent the past several months replacing the old Koonford Bridge with a new 66-foot bridge in the Laurel Fork Gorge, Carter County, Tennessee. At 54, he is one of the youngest of this group of dedicated and amazingly skilled workers. (photos by club member Kim Peters)

Back in late summer, John got his new puppy, naming her Ivy to correspond to The Laurel of Asheville, the magazine where I work. After we’d had her just one week, our bigger dog, Dukkha, accidentally broke her metacarpal bone and Ivy had to be in a cast for four weeks. She’s finally healed, growing stronger every day and made her first trek onto the AT recently.

Ivy’s first day home, at 8 weeks old.

Bo holding Ivy at our vet during one of the splint-change visits, about 10 weeks.

Ivy’s first time on the Appalachian Trail at about 18 weeks old.

Dukkha “protecting” Ivy now that she is well.

And finally, the progress continues on Beaugarts, the addition John is building onto his existing house, in which the newlyweds will live together. Pictures tell the story here, and you can always call John to learn more details.

Snow has already come to Flag Pond, Tennessee, this year, and John has been working hard to get our new house under roof by winter. Right now, during our one-year anniversary week, he is in the process of integrating the old and new structures, as the new house is basically a larger two-story addition onto the existing cabin he built six years ago.

Bo says his style reflects the way you would build a barn instead of the way typical houses are built today. For instance, the framing wood is 2X6, not 2X4, and he cut and nailed the frame together “by hand,” (not with a pneumatic hammer), using 6-inch ring-shank pole-barn nails, which are hard to come by these days. His neighbor brought over a small crane and helped John to set up the structure after he had built it by himself in pieces.

John is always arriving in Asheville with the casual scrapes and bruises that accompany total immersion in a building project. He says you can’t get anything done in the physical world if you are preoccupied with the possibility of getting hurt. Evidently, he’s always had this philosophy.

I asked him recently to tell me a little about how he learned to do what he does. Being the youngest of five, John said the older siblings would take off and kind of “ditch” him. So he’d end up at some neighbor’s place watching and helping with a project of some sort, and that’s how a lot of his “making” and “building” skills got started.

His oldest brother, Art, recently shared the family picture below, which is precious to John, as all the photographs he had of his family burned in a fire in Arkansas. Art shared these reflections about John:

“As we know, in grammar school, it’s not cool to hang out with even the kids one grade below you. In the family photo below, I was about 19 or 20 years old, John about 9 or 10 (we’re 10 years apart). I was off to college when John was 9 years old. My younger brother [by one year], Al, got a gymnastics scholarship to Michigan State. John liked the gymnastics Al did, tried anything; we joked he was like a chimp.

John is at bottom left, behind him Al, then Mary, his dad and mom, and Art standing behind Eddie.

“From that, some of his nicknames: Johnny Bump (always some kind of bump somewhere from trying some acrobatic move), shortened to Bump, or Bumpus, or J.Fred Bump, a takeoff on the chimp that was on the Today show, J.Fred Muggs. He was always into nature, catching frogs, snakes, etc., as much as you could be in Houston, but that bloomed when he went to college, forestry school in east Texas.

“I told John some stories about my trekking in Nepal. I took four month-long trips to Nepal in ’73 & ’74, and hiked in the Himalayas, never high enough to be on snow or glaciers, not over 11,000 feet in altitude, but to a week’s walking from the nearest road. I also told him how in India and Nepal, they’d say to me: “Oh, you’re from USA! Mighty rivers, huge tall trees,” which made me think that to “be in the wilderness,” you didn’t have to go halfway around the world; there are plenty of spectacular natural beauty spots here. Maybe as a result of those conversations, I haven’t ever heard John talk about wanting to explore outside of the US.”

Thanks, Art, and thank you, Bodacious!
More photos of the house below, and more to come soon. ~frances

Yesterday (July 15) was John’s birthday and, for those who know him, it’ll come as no surprise that he spent it working on our new house, which we’ve dubbed Beaugart’s (a combination of our two names). In fact, quite a bit has happened on this project over the past month and a half. Every picture tells a story, and so here is a visual taste of what’s been going on.

May 28, groundbreaking; site excavation

What the site looked like just before excavation.

Ground breaking.

View of work from the lily pond.

John worked right with the back hoe to pull out rocks for landscaping later.

In fact, we excavated some really BIG rocks!

Measuring to make sure the foundation is level.

June 20, we got our concrete cinder blocks

June 21, we got our framing lumber. Thanks for helping, Randall!

June 27, the tubing was laid for in-slab heating/cooling. Thanks for helping, Tom!

Photo by Warren Lynn

June 30, the concrete was poured

Due to heavy rain the previous day, the trucks had trouble getting up to the site.

But thanks to help from a team of heroic men, the pour was a success!

Helping John out were three of his Appalachian Trail maintenance buddies.

Just Jim, Lumpy, Bob Peoples and Bodacious hard at work.

All the guys got really dirty and chewed up by the concrete.

Oh, and it rained.

What the slab looked like the morning after the pour.

Now John is working on preparations for placing the cinder block. We will keep you posted.

We just returned from a great weekend trip to attend the Appalachian Trail Museum’s Hall of Fame banquet.

Although John has made the walking sticks for the Hall of Fame’s inductees since its inception in 2011 – and helped lug some ancient equipment out of the old grist mill that became the museum – he had never made the trek up for the actual event.

Everyone was thrilled to see John in attendance and, much to his complete surprise, he was recognized with a beautiful certificate and warm applause for his artistic efforts over the years.

It’s true that John lives without electricity and sans computer, but he asked that I help him create a site where he could show his work, as well as photos of his beloved AT (coming soon!). We both hope you enjoy this new site.

~frances and john

John, Frances and Dukkha at the AT Museum.

The Appalachian Trail Museum is in a stone gristmill building that was part of the former Pine Grove Iron Works.

Bodacious was asked to give a short presentation about how he creates the walking sticks.